The Terminader

I received no complaints about my reference to 2000 Nader voters as “idiots” in my last post. Given the total number of readers of this blog, zero turns out to be a significant minority, so I felt an obligation to address this issue in more detail.

Nader voters represent a big problem in our particular form of democratic republic: idealists who are willing to split the vote on their side of the political divide in close elections, willingly ensuring victory for the other side. Bush's 2000 win is their greatest folly, but they continue to spoil elections all over the country, especially in Vermont, where they put an ultra-conservative in as Lt. Governor and are threatening to tip Bernie Sanders' house seat into Republican territory later this year.

These self-satisfied would-be rebels put forth a few flimsy arguments and naive assumptions that I would like to demolish once and for all.

“Democrat and Republican front-runners are pretty much indistinguishable anyway, so why not cast a protest vote?”

I think that the recent selection of Supreme Court appointees chosen directly from the right-wing's a la carte menu throws into high relief the real, undeniable differences between, for example, Gore and Bush, and the profound long term consequences of those differences. There are a few other policy variations I could list, such as a little thing called THE WAR IN IRAQ, but I think the Supreme Court alone is enough to lay this one to rest.

"You should vote your conscience over political expediency."

Really? Let's leave aside the fact that causing a Bush victory and all of its nightmarish sequelae shouldn't exactly work as a salve to the progressive conscience. Instead, let us imagine that all of these progressives really do want to simply vote for the person they can feel best about rather than for someone with any chance of actually being elected. If this is true, then surely individual progressives can think of someone more heartwarming to them personally than Ralph Nader and write them in on the ballot.

William Sloane Coffin, perhaps. Or, now that I think about it, why restrict yourself to the living? How about Harriett Beecher Stowe? And don't forget favorite fictional characters, like maybe that psychiatrist played by Barbra Streisand in Prince of Tides or Aslan from Narnia!

Ultimately maybe they'll feel the most comfortable just writing in their own names. Why leave anything to chance, and you never know...

"It's not Nader's fault, it's Gore's fault for not running a better campaign"

Oh, so mean ole' Mr. Gore forced your hand in that ballot box, did he? Anyone with an ounce of common sense realizes that Nader ran an outsider campaign to make a point and should have dropped out and endorsed Gore before the election. It is proof of his pathological ego that he did not. The responsibility lies more squarely on the Nader voters' shoulders than those of Nader himself, however.

But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that Al Gore had suddenly taken positions pleasing to these addle-pated Greens and Progressives. Do they really think he would have picked up more votes than he would have lost? And then his failure really would have been his fault. Or, even more ridiculously, let's imagine Gore had dropped out and endorsed Nader. Anyone not sure of what the outcome would have been in that case? Winona LaDuke a heartbeat from the presidency? Please.

Face it, this is, at heart, a very conservative country. There is no popular progressive revolt just about to emerge. The best you can hope for is to nibble around the edges, and that must be done within the current political duopoly. This is not Italy or Israel, whose coalition governments demonstrate the advantages and flaws of multi-party systems.

In almost all elections, local, state, and national, progressives must stop splitting the liberal vote.

Those who are willing to childishly generate more conservative victories are more directly responsible for the current scary state of our government, all three branches, than any neocon.

Schrodinger's Ass

"Ass" as in "Donkey".

"Donkey" as in "Democrat".

"Schrodinger" as in the pioneering quantum-mechanics theorist.

He created the following thought experiment, commonly referred to as "Schrodinger's Cat" (among people who commonly refer to such things), to illustrate an important idea known as a "superposition" :

A cat is placed in a windowless box along with a vial of poison gas. The vial will perhaps open, and thus kill the cat, based on some unpredictable random mechanism. (We can safely infer from this set-up that Schrodinger was more of a dog-person, and, more worrisomely, was German.)

Since, without looking, we have no way of knowing whether or not the random process opened the vial at any given time, the only way to determine the health of the cat is to open the box. Until we open the box, the cat is, for all practical purposes, both alive and dead. The cat is said to be in a "superposition" of states, both thriving and deceased at the same time. When we overcome our revulsion at Kitty's Edgar Allen Poe-like predicament and peek inside, the cat is said to "collapse" into one of the two states.

Which brings us to the Democrats.

Polls show that a generic, unidentified Democratic candidate will beat a Republican in a huge number of races around the country. The same was true of the last presidential election. Let's call this unidentified candidate "Schrodinger's Ass" since they are in a superposition of positions. All that's known about them is that they aren't Republican.

Are they for or against the war? Are they socially and economically liberal or conservative? Are they centrist or progressive? We can't know until we name a real, live candidate and they collapse into a specific set of policies.

Understandably many Democrats have tried mightily to retain the enviable qualities of superpositionality all the way through election day. A vague policy position allows individual voters to project their hopes and priorities onto a candidate, but a strong and clear position that delights one group will permanently alienate another. But this is no way to run a campaign or a country.

Leadership, a word whose modern usage I generally loathe for its meaningless, high-school athletic awards-dinner banality, but which is actually required in this context, demands specificity. This is the genius of turn-of-the-century Republicans. They have constructed a clear platform and demanded and received loyalty from their entire rank-and-file, no matter how at odds individual Republicans might be with specific parts of the platform.

Democrats, such as the terrifyingly unapologetic mindless progressives whose Nader votes handed Bush the 2000 election, may well be too ornery to engage in such herd behavior, but they have to try.

The only alternative is for the candidates to run for their various offices silently and with Unknown Comic-style paper bags over their heads. Maybe they can even change the election laws so they can list themselves on the ballot as "Generic Democrat". But that begs the question of what the hell they'll do if they actually manage to get elected, because superpositional cats can't chase mice or play with string, much less deal with a nuclear weapons wielding Iran.